Our sixth seminar will be presented by Dr Ayo Mansaray, Senior Lecturer in Sociology of Education and Policy at King's College London, in the School of Education, Communication and Society.

Abstract

Colourism scholarship, originally developed in North American sociology (Hunter, 2016; Monk, 2021), has documented the educational and social premium attached to lighter skin within racialised communities. A more recent UK literature, led by Phoenix and colleagues (Phoenix, 2014; Phoenix and Craddock, 2022, 2025), has specified how colourism is reproduced and contested within British minoritised ethnic communities, including within families and the gendered dynamics of desirability.

In parallel, work on UK mixed-race educational experience has identified the institutional invisibility of mixed-heritage pupils and the particular vulnerabilities of mixed-Black students in education (Tikly et al., 2004; Joseph-Salisbury, 2018). The two literatures have proceeded largely in parallel: UK colourism scholarship has focused principally on monoracial or mixed-Black and South Asian experience, while UK mixed-race scholarship has theorised authenticity and identity without centring phenotype. Mixed-heritage young people occupy precisely the position where these axes converge.

Drawing on focus groups and interviews with fifty mixed-heritage sixth-formers and forty-two mixed-heritage university students in London, alongside questionnaire material, the paper builds on a wider exploratory study of mixed-heritage young people's educational experiences (Mansaray et al., 2025). I argue that mixedness intensifies the visibility of phenotype at the level of social interaction precisely because educational institutions render it invisible at the level of categorisation. The two operate as a single dynamic: phenotype is hyper-legible in the interactional spaces of family, peer, friendship, and intimate life because the institution lacks the categories to register it as an axis of stratification.

This double movement produces three partially overlapping mechanisms of evaluation through which mixed-heritage young people are positioned: colourist evaluation within the family; aesthetic and sexual valuation of racial ambiguity in peer and intimate contexts; and authenticity policing through cultural and class performance, in which accusations of being 'whitewashed' operate as a peer-led mechanism of disciplining belonging, particularly directed at mixed-Black young women.

Reading these accounts through the synthetic Bourdieu–Goffman framework I have developed elsewhere, I treat shade and racial ambiguity as embodied capitals whose value is differentially constituted across the family, school, and university fields, and activated in situated interaction rituals through which racial authenticity is negotiated. The convergence is gendered: in this sample, the privileged subject of colourist valuation is overwhelmingly female.

The paper shows that educational spaces are not neutral backdrops to colourism but a field in which colourist hierarchies operate intensively. They do so in the interactional spaces of family, peer, friendship, and intimate life, below the institution's perceptual threshold. What allows them to operate there is the institution's categorial silence on phenotype: the absence of recognition is itself the condition of their operation. Recognition would not simply make these dynamics visible; it would alter the conditions of their operation.

Biography

Dr. Ayo Mansaray is Senior Lecturer in Sociology of Education and Policy at King's College London, in the School of Education, Communication and Society. He is a sociologist of education whose work addresses educational inequalities of race, gender and social class. His research draws on Bourdieusian sociology alongside the microsociological tradition of Goffman, Collins and Scheff. Recent projects include an exploratory study of mixed-heritage young people's educational experiences in London; qualitative research on Black doctoral students' trajectories and experiences of race-targeted scholarship programmes in UK higher education; and an examination of minority ethnic students' experiences and attainment gaps in undergraduate healthcare programmes.